Mister Sandman
by Us-And-Them
Summary: He's been dreaming. It shouldn't even be a surprise anymore. It's a constant, and it always ends the same way—blankets a mess, blood on the pillow, some broken-record-image looping quietly in his head. *My take on a 16-year-old Tommy Anderson. Oneshot.*


"You've got to be kidding..."

He glances down at the blood on his hand and back up at the mirror. The reflection regards him a moment longer—a scrawny teen in black with messy hair and a bloody nose. It's not-quite-raining and the window's misted over. In the dark he can almost see a streetlight blinking half a block away.

He's been dreaming. It shouldn't even be a surprise anymore. It's a constant, and it always ends the same way—blankets a mess, blood on the pillow, some broken-record-image looping quietly in his head. He presses a tissue to his face, waiting for the blood to stop—listening to the rain—trying to find a foothold somewhere in a dream that's already beginning to fade out.

A car makes its way down the street with taillights pooling in its wake.

It's 2:06 in the morning.

_Mister Sandman, bring me a dream..._

Tommy leans his head on his hand and turns to stare out the window—placidly ignoring the physics lecture coming at him from the front of the room. There's a drawing of a something in his notebook—a something with red eyes and tentacles, that doesn't so much move as hover. He's told his drawings are dark. He doesn't find them dark. They're just what he sees when he closes his eyes.

The rain-patterns smear down the windowsill. He can trace them with his eyes—watch them dripping down, and down, and down. The entire morning began in a low-contrast shade of gray. He doesn't remember his dream. If he could find it in his mind, he would—reach back into his subconscious and draw it out. Force it out. Remember. But it isn't there anymore—and never is. He's left with a half-thought. A nameless emotion and a blank slate. The feeling of waking up on a rainy Monday in a low-contrast shade of gray.

"Mr. Anderson, are you even listening to me?"

Tommy jerks his head up. The teacher is standing over him with a dry smile on his face, and no—he had not been listening. One or two sniggers find their way out of the silence at the back of the room. He blushes. If anyone catches his eyes he will look straight down. He'll look down at the floor.

"I was—I was just—" He stammers, feeling the words catching on one another in his throat.

_Just what?_

Out of the corner of his eye he can see the raindrops falling.

_Down, and down, and down._

He kicks a rock into the street—watching it skid to a halt in a puddle and spray water in every direction. He missed the bus. Its doors had closed as he was running for them, and he'd reached the stop just in time for the driver to see his small, receding form on the sidewalk, disappearing into the fog. Now he's got twenty-one blocks and sixty minutes to home.

The rain picks up as he starts walking, soaking through his jacket and his sneakers until he bitterly regrets the bus's choice to leave on time. It's a familiar routine. He wonders if anyone will notice when he walks through the front door an hour late. A set of tires speeds by him. He steps back to keep the spray from dousing his jeans. If he kept straight and missed the next left, he would not end up at home at all, and there would be nothing to stop him from walking on down this street forever.

He can count the words he said aloud today on two hands—two thousand people in one building, and he spoke to none of them. He wonders, some days, when it became so difficult to speak. Words don't cooperate with him anymore. They dissolve before they can make sentences from thoughts, and they disappear. He can hear his shoes scuffing on the wet concrete—the sound is louder than anything else in the world. The streetlights are just starting to come on.

He counts the headlights as they go by.

_Seven, eight, nine..._

He opens the door and drops his jacket in the hall, letting the rain drip off is hair and his face before making his way to the stairs. The TV's flickering out from the den. His father is home. Tommy doesn't go in to say "hi." He can tell, looking in through the doorway, that today is a bad day, and he follows his mother's tactful example in avoiding him on bad days. It isn't that his father is a bad drunk—he'd never rage or break things or yell—he could never fit that old movie stereotype. But the frustration of it takes something out of you, and it's painful to watch. Tommy waits and goes quietly to his room.

Door locked—he takes off his rain-damp t-shirt and lets it fall in a heap on the floor, pulls another from his dresser, goes to click his computer on. The bland voices of the evening news come in through the walls in mumbles. He doesn't listen. He can't say he particularly cares. And the echoes of recordings of voices don't sound like voices at all.

_And at ten o'clock we'll have..._

The lights are off and it's the computer that's lighting the room—blue electric light from wall to wall. It's a quarter after one. Four windows are vying for space on his desktop screen. He types slowly, enjoying the sound the keyboard makes in the silence—soft clicking in the dark, in the middle of the night. It makes him feel competent, writing his programs and watching them run. It's the one thing he's sure he can do. Computers make a good deal more sense than people do. They speak a language devoid of subversiveness and they do not give you strange looks. He's long since come to prefer one over the other.

When the clock hits three he turns it off, listening to the thunder through the window as he lies down on the bed. It's a debate—whether he ought to sleep or not. In a way he's tired, but he'd rather not—he'd rather stay here, push away the morning as long as possible, a few hours more, and for that he must stay awake. So he sits, and he stares at the ceiling, and he thinks. He waits. He watches the ceiling fan in the dim heights of the room and hears the late night TV still on, a billion miles away in the den.

Around four o'clock he loses the battle and falls asleep before he can notice.

_Mister Sandman..._

It's just before dawn, and he wakes up in the dark, blankets tied in neat and strangling little knots and cast to the floor. He's sweating. His shirt is sticky with it and he finds himself shivering as soon as the blankets are fully off him. His alarm will come on in an hour. There's a dream silhouetted somewhere at the back of his mind, and fading. He pulls the blankets back and waits for the feeling, empty and strained, of forgetting something you never quite remembered in the first place—the feeling of warm water gently filling up your lungs. A car drives by and hits the walls with a burst of yellow light. Its tires on the asphalt break the silence.

In an hour his day will start over and he'll get up. The last remnants of the dream will wash away in the shower, and only the feeling will stay with him as he walks for the bus in the still-heavy rain. He won't remember. And when he wakes up the morning after that, he'll do just the same. _A nameless emotion and a blank slate. The feeling of waking up on a rainy Monday in a low contrast shade of grey._

_Mister Sandman, bring me a dream..._


End file.
